Gerrymandering case: Lawmakers can't ignore Utah voters, Utah Supreme Court rules

The Utah Supreme Court ruled that the Utah Legislature overstepped its authority when it rewrote a 2018 voter-approved ballot initiative that established an independent redistricting process and drew its own congressional maps that split Salt Lake County into four different congressional districts.
Read more at sltrib.com

[@haroldwhite5761]

Cool, but what about the other voter initiatives the legislature ignored or rewrote?

[@THEcd6pack]

Hello, I'm in Germany, so maybe this isn't my fight, but I think you should probably study civics a bit more. The reason a lot of big liberal cities are split up into smaller areas with large swaths of rural republican land is so the cities, most of which are liberal (this trend is constant worldwide), can't force through legislation that's harmful to the rural communities. A good example is how many Californian farmers can't access the colorado river water for their farms and instead have to tunnel down dozens of meters to access ground water through well systems. Congressional districts cover 750,000 people if memory serves, which means Salt Lake City makes up nearly a third of a district by itself. Utah gets 4 congressional seats from 4 districts, yes, but out of its 28 COUNTIES, only 2 voted majority democrat. Also to be taken into consideration, in the state of 3.3 million, there are only 276,000 registered democrats. Extrapolated out this means there are potentially 760,000 democrats in the state, however, this number isn't exactly fair since republicans tend to have an average of twice as many children as democrats, and trends point towards people affiliating more with the republican party and adopting more conservative ideas later on on life, so that number is likely closer to 500,000 than 700,000. This is what a republic looks like. The will of urban centers cannot, for the good of the nation as a whole, be imposed on rural areas and visa versa. Some laws that make perfect sense in a city like Los Angles might make perfect sense given their geography, population density, culture, values, etc, but not make any sense to a rural county in Oklahoma for example. Gun control is a great example used by Senator Bernie Sanders who described the issue as being urban versus rural. Having a fully automatic rifle makes little sense in Los Angles, but farmers in Oklahoma may need something like that to kill wild hogs that can destroy an entire field of crops in a matter of days and typically live in very large packs, so if the USA were to ban guns, farming as an industry may become unsustainable in certain parts of the USA, and its absense may spur the migration of hogs, for example, to other parts of the country, making those areas unsustainable. This would be another example of giving disproportionate power to liberal urban centers. This is exactly why civics and critical thinking is important. You should focus on state and local government elections if your goal is to achieve effective change.

[@silverbemyname]

Sorry but this is how democracy works. Splitting democratic votes is anti- democratic and gives rural voters the power to impose values and laws that destroy urban communities. More people live in that area, thus they deserve representation. If they make laws that negatively impact rural communities then maybe people in rural areas should think about the fact that they chose to live in a place with little voting power. That's they're problem, not the problem of the majority.